Sure enough the finished piece lacked the metronomic timekeeping that would have made life easier for everyone. Instead the
rhythm track accelerated and then lurched back to the correct tempo in a volatile fashion that Ron now had to take into account.
The day was saved by John Aldiss, the choirmaster. John was a former King’s College, Cambridge choral scholar who had formed
the John Aldiss Choir, noted for performing works by contemporary classical composers. At the time, he was also Choral Professor
at the Guildhall School of Music in London. His disciplined classical choir had (it must be noted) a far more positive attitude
and plenty of experience of dealing with orchestras. With their unruffled help, the recording was completed. However, there
was another problem we were unaware of at the time. We had been forced to supply relatively high levels of backing track to
the orchestra on monitor speakers, some of which had been picked up by their microphones. This unerasable spill forever ensured
that ‘Atom Heart Mother’ lacked the sonic clarity we have always strived for.
My report card comments for the ‘Atom Heart Mother’ track would be: good idea, could try harder. ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’
on the second side is a similar example. This was a sound picture of an English breakfast, starting with the flare of a match
lighting a gas ring, followed by the sound of the bacon sizzling away, along with dripping taps and other old favourites from
the sound library. Why we used our crew member Alan Styles as the protagonist, I have no idea. Roger, Rick and David each
managed to produce a song to complete the second side – including a favourite in David’s ‘Fat Old Sun’. It would appear that
the threat of being incarcerated in Abbey Road for life, with no chance of parole, was sufficient to galvanise even the most
reticent songwriters to perform.
The title of
Atom Heart Mother
was a last-minute affair. Under pressure to come up with a name we scanned the evening papers for an idea, and saw an article
about a woman who had given birth after being fitted with a pacemaker. The headline provided the title. The cow cover was
an inspired piece of work, conceived by Storm and John Blake, which we linked to the album by giving the individual sections
of the ‘Atom Heart Mother’ track names like ‘Funky Dung’ and ‘Breast Milky’. Storm remembers that when he showed the cover
to EMI, one of the executives screamed at him, ‘Are you mad? Do you want to destroy this record company?…’
Having committed ‘Atom Heart’ to vinyl, and after the pastoral adventures at Shepton Mallet, the next orchestral rendition
of the piece was at Blackhill’s second free concert in London. ‘Lose Your Head At Hyde Park’ on 18th July 1970 promised to
present ourselves, Edgar Broughton, Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, the Third Ear Band, ‘and thousands of beautiful people’.
This event had a much less spontaneous feel than the original free concert: more restrictions, a larger backstage area and
a VIP section as hierarchical as anything organised by the court of the Sun King. The experience had lost a certain amount
of its charm, or maybe we had become more jaundiced.
We also took the show to Europe that month. By now we were becoming more adept at working with an orchestra. There were still
plenty of opportunities for crises, though – there was one gig in Aachen where we arrived, set everything up and then discovered
that all the sheet music had been left behind. Tony Howard was phoned in London and given the mission of flying them over
on the next plane. Determined not to have to face the humiliation of admitting our mistake, we stalled for time by doing an
endless sound check. At the very least we must have impressed the brass section with our commitment to perfection.
We interrupted the protracted recording work on
Atom Heart
Mother
to do a short French tour, and used the opportunity to meet Roland Petit, the director of the Ballet de Marseille. Sometime
earlier, Roland had contacted Steve asking us to write a new piece of music for his company – and we arranged to have a brief
meeting with him in Paris during the summer of 1970, en route to a combined holiday/mini-tour of the south of France. We still
hadn’t learnt that work and pleasure is a combination to be avoided if possible.
In four second-hand E-types and one Lotus Elan – yet another car dealer had spotted us all coming – we hammered down the long,
straight French roads, leaving ominous trails of blue oil smoke in our wake. We had a particularly successful time with Roland,
not least because on a French public holiday he managed at short notice to find Roger, myself and our respective wives a terrific
hotel, and a sensational restaurant to eat in for the evening.
We then sped on down to the Côte d’Azur to rendezvous with Rick and David, who had not lingered in Paris. Initially we stayed
in a hotel on the front at Cannes. This was pure vacation: we learnt to waterski under the tuition of an extraordinarily strong
Frenchman, who was able to hold up his pupils bodily while they learnt to ski. His great experience on skis was only undermined
by his tenuous grasp of English. It was only later on we discovered that his insistent command of ‘No pushing’ should actually
have been ‘No pulling’.
We were on the Riviera for a package of Festival appearances, playing at lovely locations surrounded by pine trees and with
a view of the Mediterranean. After performing at the Antibes Jazz Festival, we rented a huge villa near St Tropez where the
base crew, band and management, plus families, could stay while we did further gigs at Fréjus and other resorts along the
Côte d’Azur. These were still quite low-budget days, and the house we rented was not on a promontory jutting into the ocean,
but inland in the middle of some scrubland.
The atmosphere was not always a scene of domesticity despite the presence of wives and assorted children. On one occasion
I met a couple of strange women acting suspiciously in the villa. Challenging them to explain themselves I suddenly recognised
them as being Steve O’Rourke and Peter Watts getting ready for a night out at a St Tropez club, both in full drag. Thankfully
I was suffering from a combination of food poisoning and sunstroke and so was unable to join them. As an experiment in communal
living it was not a huge success. Although when there were just four of us travelling in close proximity on tour it could
occasionally get quite tense, with so many more people, there were endless opportunities for friction.
My relationship with Roger was in any case going through a temporary
froideur.
The trouble stemmed from an earlier incident when Roger and I and our respective wives had somehow got onto the subject of
Roger’s infidelity on the road. Roger had found some difficulty in tolerating my joining in with the girls’ censorious tutting
at his behaviour, mainly because I had been no better, I’d simply left out the confession part. On this occasion I would have
to concede that the meter was well into the duplicity rather than diplomacy zone, and it took Roger some time to forgive this
particular episode.
Judy Waters remembers the pang of jealousy she felt when Lindy and I contrived to come up with an excuse to leave St Tropez
early. Waving gaily we put another few litres of oil in the increasingly smoky Lotus and headed for Yugoslavia…
The chance for rest and recuperation was short. The American tour that followed almost immediately coincided with the release
of
Atom Heart Mother,
and so we felt obliged to repeat the orchestral experience. David and Steve flew to New York to book the musicians, putting
together separate brass sections and choirs for the East and West Coast legs of the tour – announced in Los
Angeles by a forty-foot billboard of Storm’s cow over Sunset Strip. The American session players, under the baton of Peter
Phillips, were both very able and relaxed about playing different kinds of music – and I am happy to report the total absence
of any recalcitrance, jobsworthiness or beer-drenched tubas.
By now American touring was becoming more routine as the novelty wore off: this was our second tour in 1970 – we’d already
been over in May for several weeks. In addition, a communal fear of flying often led us to undertake eight-hour car trips
in the mistaken belief we would find this less stressful. In fact, of course, these mammoth journeys simply induced terminal
boredom. In the Hilton in Scottsdale, we fell back on any opportunity for a wager – I recall David riding a motorbike through
our hotel restaurant for one particular bet. The diners either thought that this was normal, or that he was packing a gun,
because they completely ignored him.
On the first tour of 1970 the most significant show had to be playing the Fillmore East in New York. Bill Graham was not sure
we could fill a 3,000-seat theatre, especially as our last date in the city had only been a 200-seater club, so instead of
promoting the show himself he rented the theatre out to us for $3,000. We sold out. It was the most money we had made, and
contributed to an ongoing dissatisfaction with the Tower label, which was then EMI’s American operation. We were building
good audiences, but this was not being reflected in our record sales. Someone or something was at fault and, confident as
always that the blame was not ours, we made a note to do something about it as soon as possible.
Fillmore East was also notable for two other reasons. We had a scruffy-looking bunch of blokes ejected from our dressing room
only to discover later that they were members of the Band, Bob Dylan’s backing group – which included Robbie Robertson and
Levon Helm – and of course recording artists in their own right. This was particularly embarrassing for us since
Music From Big Pink
was a favoured album in all our record collections. And we also met Arthur Max, the lighting designer who was working for
Bill at the theatre. Arthur added his own lighting to our show that night, and his innovative skills were noted and filed
away for future reference.
That May 1970 tour of America had come to an abrupt end when all our equipment, parked in a rental truck outside the Royal
Orleans Hotel in the centre of New Orleans, was stolen during the night. Thankfully this was by far the most luxurious hotel
of the tour so if we were to be marooned, better it should be there than anywhere else. The other advantage was that the luxurious
pool on the first-floor terrace was staffed by attractive girls who diluted our grief with a complimentary bar service.
More practically one of them had a boyfriend in the FBI and he came down to see if he could help. He indicated as tactfully
as he could that it was not impossible that the local police might be able to be more helpful if we offered a reward. We left
it up to Steve to resolve the problem. To our astonishment the equipment reappeared a day later (short of a couple of guitars).
There was obviously an imaginative community policing initiative in place whereby officers could offer an all-in, one-stop
service of removal and recovery…The only real puzzle now was what the reward should be to the police who returned it. Their
suggestion of ‘Let your conscience be your guide’ was not much help since our conscience thought they deserved nothing. However,
pragmatically we decided we might want to return to New Orleans one day. Although we had the equipment back we decided not
to reinstate the gigs we had cancelled, and returned home forthwith.
After the
Atom Heart
tour of the States that autumn, we were on an English tour all the way through to the end of the year.
Although we wanted the workload, we were probably unaware how exhausting it all was. But at the start of 1971, we turned our
attention and any energies we did have to our next album, which we started at EMI in January.
With no new songs, we devised innumerable exercises to try and speed up the process of creating musical ideas. This included
playing on separate tracks with no reference to what the rest of us were doing – we may have agreed a basic chord structure,
but the tempo was random. We simply suggested moods such as ‘first two minutes romantic, next two up tempo’. These sound notes
were called ‘Nothings 1–24’ and the choice of name was apt. After some weeks not much of value had emerged, and certainly
no complete songs. There were few even worth considering as working ideas. After ‘Nothings’ we went on to produce ‘Son Of
Nothings’, followed by ‘Return Of The Son Of Nothings’, which eventually became the working title for the new album.
The most useful piece was simply a sound, a single note struck on the piano and played through a Leslie speaker. This curious
device, normally used with a Hammond organ, employs a rotating horn that amplifies the given sound. The horn, revolving at
a variable speed, creates a Doppler effect, just as a car passing the listener at constant speed appears to change its note
as it goes by. By putting the piano through the Leslie, this wonder note of Rick’s had an element of the sound of Asdic, the
submarine hunter, about it. We could never re-create the feeling of this note in the studio, especially the particular resonance
between the piano and the Leslie, and so the demo version was used for the album, cross-fading into the rest of the track.
Combined with a wistful guitar phrase from David, we had enough inspiration to devise a complete piece, which evolved into
‘Echoes’; its final, slightly meandering shape had a rather pleasant sense of slow pacing and elongated construction. This
felt like a
real development of the techniques we had hinted at in
A Saucerful Of Secrets
and
Atom Heart Mother.
And it certainly felt much more controlled than having to do the damned thing in one take as we’d had to on ‘Atom Heart Mother’,
since we could assemble the music using cross-fades on the mixing desk.
The guitar sound in the middle section of ‘Echoes’ was created inadvertently by David plugging in a wah-wah pedal back to
front. Sometimes great effects are the results of this kind of pure serendipity, and we were always prepared to see if something
might work on a track. The grounding we’d received from Ron Geesin in going beyond the manual had left its mark.